atw: Re: Should we give the users what they want?

From: Stuart Burnfield <slb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

To: Austechwriter <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:42:27 +0900 (WST)

On information and skimming:
Tony's article uncritically quotes statements about the increasing amount of
information:
"children encounter as much information in a single year as their grandparents
did in an entire lifetime"
"The amount of unique new information generated this year will be more than the
previous 5000 years"
How is this measured? By volume? If so, that amusing Youtube clip from the
Batman TV series that my brother sent me probably contains more 'new'
information than The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Even better, if next year a
couple of other people post copies of the same Batman scene to Youtube, and
noone posts another copy of the Feynmann book, would that mean there's now
triple the amount of new information?
"Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb.
I skim it." (says Dr Bruce Freidman)
Could that be because experience has taught Bruce that the typical blog post is
95% blather and 5% useful information? If blogs were a good medium for
communicating technical information perhaps they would be read more and skimmed
less?
BTW I enjoyed and admired that Commoncraft video, but it doesn't answer a
single one of the many questions I've had about using wikis in the last few
months. I went to the help.
Stuart